You Had to Be There shows us how a Toronto musical gave way to a comedy revolution

You Had to Be There is not just a documentary about the celebrated 1972 production of Godspell in Toronto, which effectively launched the comedy careers of Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Andrea Martin, Paul Shaffer, Dave Thomas and Victor Garber, among others. It’s a film about how the satellite of a Broadway musical midwifed a comedy revolution that would manifest in comedy landmarks including SCTV and Saturday Night Live all the way to Schitt’s Creek and Only Murders in the Building.

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Curiously, the film premiered at the 2025 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival and took a little more than a year to finally hit the Canadian cinema circuit. (After opening at Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox on Friday, Oct. 2, it will trickle its way across the country throughout the fall, culminating in a broadcast on CBC on Dec. 27. Subsequent to that, it will be available to stream on Gem.)

The film’s director Nick Davis and Davis’s wife Jane Mendelsohn, who wrote the doc, explained in a Zoom interview about how the film’s release hit the pause button for a year.

“I think it had a lot to do with the distributor working with some of the cast members’ own schedules and when they would be available to help promote the film,” says Davis, whose past docs skewed toward sports, including Once Upon a Time in Queens, about the 1986 New York Mets, and The Comeback, about the 2004 Boston Red Sox.

“The summer became a very complicated time and the spring was complicated. And so they said, well, let’s hold it till September. But we’re thrilled it will be playing in Canadian theatres.”

In fact, the timing of the doc’s release may be a lucky thing, given the current, inexplicable hostility the U.S. now shows Canada via a trade war. Davis says the doc may serve to remind people of a happier, more fruitful relationship between the two nations.

“I think the timing is perfect,” Davis says. “What’s interesting is, in the film, we have people talking about how the world felt like it was falling apart and there was war and famine and Godspell was the joy that the world seemed to need in the early ‘70s. And we feel that way about the film. There’s international tensions and people changing the names of lakes and gulfs and whatever. And here’s a bunch of young kids in their twenties coming together, making joy and love and changing the world through comedy and music.”

Mendelsohn, a novelist (I Was Amelia Earhart), screenwriter, and producer, says though she was a born-and-bred New Yorker, she always felt an abiding affection for Toronto.

“I actually lived in Toronto later in the ‘70s for two years,” she says. “And so I had a personal connection to the city and I never thought it would come back around this way. It’s not that I’m Canadian, but I did spend formative years there. And I felt it was such a different culture from America in the ‘70s and some things about it were just so special and stayed with me. The people who were in the production in Toronto had a kind of exuberance, innocence, and a fresh take on the world and comedy that I think we’d all do well to acknowledge.”

Though the production features contemporary interviews with Levy, Andrea Martin, Dave Thomas, Brent Carver and others, Martin Short proved to be the doc’s MVP off-camera.

Davis arranged a lunch to pitch the project to Short, and by the time they met, Davis was amazed to learn Short had already sold the doc to most of his fellow cast members.

“He said, ‘Yeah, I talked to everybody. We all want to do it.’

“Marty was so critical to the group even staying together,” Davis says. “He had already done all the legwork and all producing, really, of bringing everybody together. It was so meaningful to all of them at the time and was such an important memory for all of them and gave them all their start in show business. And so many of them have stayed close, close friends through the years. And that we didn’t really know going in.”

A doc about a musical production does not sound like it would share common ground with one of Davis’s celebrated sports docs, but there is a common denominator, he asserts.

“I feel like there was a period in everyone’s life that was great and amazing and that’s the joy and the spirit and that’s what you’re always trying to recapture,” he says. “Certainly, with the 86 Mets, it was like this comet across the sky and a moment that we will never forget.

“And the ‘72 Toronto Godspell was weirdly similar, except the Mets dynasty fizzled and this dynasty exploded,” Davis says. “They ended up actually really changing the world through comedy.”

randall.king.arts@gmail.com

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